Thief of Happy Endings

by Kristen Chandler

  * * *

  I wait so long for my roommates to fall asleep that I’m sure Justin will be in REM sleep by the time I tap on his rickety cabin door. He opens the door before I even get my first tap. I stand there with my fist in the air as he pulls the door away. He’s in a pair of basketball shorts with a tank top on. He invites me in without talking. I feel guilty instantly. This is a bad idea.

  But I do want to talk to him. And maybe you can’t say some things about your life in the middle of a cilantro patch or in the doorway.

  I walk in and look around because I’m nervous. There isn’t much to see but Justin. A bed, which I do not want to look at. A beat-up chair. Clothes lying around, shelves and a desk made out of boards and bricks. Justin is pretty much the only amenity. So I look at him. Even in the yellow shadows of this poorly lit place I can see red stripes showing from under his tank top. If he got those scars from a horse, he was dragged a long way.

  “Banner give you trouble when you left?”

  “No,” I say. “But she’s going to be tough to work with tomorrow. Her boyfriend dumped her.”

  “Oh great,” says Justin, scratching his hair and making it stand up on his head. “Why am I always working with emotional women?”

  I cross my arms over my chest. “Is that what I am?” I’m kidding. Of course I’m emotional. The first time I met Justin I yelled at him.

  He steps forward and uncrosses my arms one at a time. We stand that way for a moment, with our hands together like we’re dancing. Then he puts one of his arms around my waist. “I like your emotions.” His fingers touch a hollow spot in my back I didn’t know I had. It sends a shiver all the way up my spine. “Like that one.” He pulls me even closer and moves his fingers up my back. “And that one.”

  I say, “I don’t like the sound of this list.”

  He relaxes and leans back. He tilts his chin to the side like he’s making the list right now, a painfully specific list, like not just the thing, but the kind of thing he notices about me, which means he may notice me a fraction of the same obsessive amount as I notice him—and this makes me feel more naked than if he was making the list out loud.

  We stand loosely against each other, waiting. Then he kisses me, just as I am thinking I’d like that. And that alone, that feeling of him knowing what I want, right as I wish for it, is so electric that even without a cumulonimbus cloud, there are small sparkling explosions in my head. He kisses my chin and then works his way around to under my ear. His hands are slow and warm. More fireworks. I hold his neck with my hands. And then we’re kissing like we’re starving. And it’s the Fourth of July, flashing and exploding until I think the sky is going to catch on fire.

  He picks me up with those arms I’ve been gawking at all summer. Why am I so short? He can tell I’m not comfortable so he puts me down and sits on his squeaky bed. And then I’m really uncomfortable. It smells musty but not awful. Like Justin. He sits next to me. Everything about this is a bad idea, but if I’m kissing him I won’t have to think about it.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “Do I look not okay?”

  He half smiles. “Maybe it’s me who’s not okay.” He looks up at his ceiling like he’s going to break some bad news to me. “When you look at me with those green eyes of yours, I sometimes stop breathing.”

  “Don’t stop breathing,” I say. “Definitely don’t stop breathing.”

  And then we both stop breathing because our mouths are doing something better. He pulls me down on the bed next to him. And I’m suddenly the perfect size. It’s like I was made to fit here next to him on his squeaky, musty bed. His hand moves up my arm and stops on my face. He sighs, and I think maybe he forgets to breathe again.

  And then, just as I feel myself surrounded by my own happiness, twisted perfectly under his arm, I remember this is me. I know what happens when I feel this happy. Maybe I’ve never been this happy. I’m not supposed to get my hopes up. Justin is flammable. You don’t get to keep that kind of pure imploding energy if you’re me. Or anyone maybe.

  He leans across me and starts kissing me again. A lot. And then everything is too much. The bed and the fireworks and the way he’s wrapped around me. The crazy-happy-cloud feeling turns to suffocation. Too much Justin, too much being in his room, too much making out, too much of the crazy feeling inside me, kicking to get out.

  I pull away from him and make a space between us. “You said you wanted to talk.”

  “What?” He laughs softly.

  I think about this for a second. I sit up and straighten my shirt on my shoulders. “What did you want to talk about?”

  “Do you want to talk right now?”

  I stand up and back into something behind me. “Sure.”

  He sits up on the edge of his bed. “Did I do something wrong?” His voice is gravelly.

  “No. I mean, you said you wanted to tell me something.”

  He gets up and walks past me and finds his flannel shirt. I watch him button it up with tight, precise fingers. He does have something to tell me. Something that he was going to tell me, after whatever he thought was going to happen had already happened.

  He turns around and faces me. “That rancher, Henry Helford. He talked the BLM into helicopters. They’ll fly those god-awful machines around, scaring the horses so bad some of them will get their legs broken. They’ll push as many into holding pens as they can Thursday night and then haul them out of here Friday while we’re gone.”

  “So you want to go out after the gather.” Here it is. Like I knew it would be.

  “It’s not a gather, Cass. It’s a mob.” Justin voice becomes urgent. “They have no right to do it. They’ve already met the quota. This is personal. Pure mean-spirited vendetta, and Hanks is not just going along. He’s paying a damn helicopter to do it.”

  “I promised Coulter. We all did.”

  Justin rubs his face with his hand and walks in a tight circle around the room. “Coulter made you. That’s not a real promise.”

  “If I make a promise, it is one.”

  “That’s fine.” Justin looks away. “I didn’t say you had to come with me.”

  “Don’t act like I’m a coward. I still have the battle scars from the last time.”

  “So you blame me.”

  “I don’t blame anyone but myself. But we promised. And the BLM is out for blood. What if they catch you and then they close this place down and no one can train the twenty horses that get homes every year? For all you know, they are setting you up. This whole thing could be to bust you.”

  “Maybe,” he says bitterly.

  “So don’t go.”

  He slaps his hands against his sides. “You don’t get it. These horses don’t belong to us. We act like it’s our job to catch them and train them, but our job is to leave them alone. They already know how to be horses. Live or die, no one has broken them or beaten them or whipped the living shit out of them yet. No one has tried to make them something they aren’t and cut their hearts out for free.” His voice shifts and cracks. His eyes are watery. What’s happening? “Don’t you get that?” he asks, covering his face.

  And then I do.

  I finally do. I finally get the part about Justin and the mustangs that I have been blind to—because whatever hard thing has happened in my life, nobody, absolutely nobody, has ever beaten the shit out of me. No one has ever broken my nose and blamed it on a horse or carved a map of hate on my skin and called it an accident. The scar I have on the back of my head really was an accident. So I don’t get what Justin has been through. But at least now I get what we’re talking about. He’s every chased, beaten, whipped, trapped, broken horse he’s ever touched.

  Our eyes collide. We’re both scared. Really scared. I reach my hand out to his shoulder. “Justin. Who did that to you? Are they . . . where is your dad?”

  He slaps my
hand away. “Are you coming with me or not?”

  I take a deep breath in. He’s upset. I need to stay calm. “They’re baiting you. This is totally a setup.”

  “You’re just afraid.” He knocks the books off the table with the back of his hand. The pages flutter open like escaping birds and drop lifelessly to the floor. I should get out of here. But I don’t care. I care about what we are finally talking about. Him and the mustangs.

  I get in front of him, staring up at his angry face. “I want to keep the mustangs safe just like you do. I want to run out and throw open every gate from one end of this stupid country to the other. I want to jump over the edge and not look. That’s what I want. But that isn’t real. It’s just some romantic idea. Sometimes you can’t get what you want, and you have to make something else work. God, Justin. Don’t go.”

  There’s a knock at the door. My heart stops. Or it feels like it. We both stand frozen.

  The knock comes again. It’s quiet. Justin walks to the door and pushes it open. A woman’s low, unhappy voice says, “You know better than this, Justin.”

  “I do,” he says. “She was just leaving.”

  I can’t get out of there fast enough.

  Kaya’s face is tight and pale. Her coat is zipped up to her chin. “Do you want to get sent home, Cassidy?”

  I don’t answer. I don’t apologize.

  “Tomorrow you call your parents. First thing in the morning. And if you don’t, you will be on the next bus out of here. Is that understood?”

  I nod. I understand.

  “I thought I could trust you, Cassidy.”

  I thought she could trust me, too. But no one trusts me now. And they shouldn’t. What do I know? The more I try to help, the worse things get. I’m so mixed up and mad and sorry and embarrassed and guilty and scared I just go back to my tent, past Banner curled up smugly in her red blanket, and climb into my rotten, no good, villainous sleeping bag. That’s how I know I’m the villain of my own story. Not even I like me anymore.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  I TAP MY teeth with my fingers before I pick up the phone. I cross my legs and then uncross them. I look at the dirt in my fingernails. Kaya is waiting out in the hall to make sure I call my parents. I look around Coulter’s office. Without Coulter staring me down in his chair I can actually look at something besides him. The room is full of trophies of all shapes and sizes. There are pictures of old clients and kids from twenty years ago. I get up and walk down Coulter’s memory lane, wondering what has happened to all these people. Did coming here turn them into teachers and ranchers and activists and leaders, or was it just another thing they did? A way they spent their summers before they ended up like everyone else.

  I call my mother first. “Hello,” she says politely. My mother has impeccable phone manners.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say. “How are you?”

  “Well . . . I’m glad you called. Finally.”

  “I’m sorry. I was upset.”

  “Are you still upset?”

  “I thought you were going to at least try to work things out.”

  “Cassidy.” There is long pause on the other end of the phone. This is how it is talking to both of my parents now. Everything is this calculation where they think about how to say things that are going to be awful no matter what words they use. “I’ve been miserable for a long time. Making it official is hard, but it feels more honest. Parents don’t need to share their misery with their kids. But you’re old enough to accept someone else’s disappointment besides your own.”

  “Okay,” I say. There isn’t much more to talk about, I guess. And if I keep talking, I’m just going to get mad. We’re all disappointed. We all don’t get what we want. Everyone loses. It seems so pointless. “Why?” I ask. I’m not even talking to her.

  “Why what?”

  “Why now? Why not in a month or a year?”

  Mom doesn’t answer for a long time. I wonder if I’ve lost the connection. I wonder if she’s going to tell me what’s really been going on with Dad this last year.

  Finally, she says, “You just can’t love some people. They won’t let you.” It’s like a slap in the face. I tell myself she’s just upset. She doesn’t mean to be that cruel about Dad. She makes a breathy sound and then clears her throat. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just . . . I need a new dream, honey.”

  Mom lets me be quiet now. I hear the twins come yelling into the room where she is, probably the kitchen, and then Kidd barks, and I realize that even though I’m homesick, I’m also glad I’m here in Coulter’s office, where I have something else besides that tiny kitchen with all its broken pieces of what could have been. I don’t know what it’s like to be my parents. It must be soul crushing. Nothing makes up for what we all lose now, but at least sitting here I can imagine a time when it won’t always be about what went wrong.

  My mind surfs over the summer. Unpacking that first day with Alice and Banner, and feeling like I’d made the biggest mistake of my life, and then looking up from the dirt at Justin an hour later and being absolutely sure. Doing chores with Ethan, cooking with Mrs. Sanchez, getting on Smokey for the first time and losing the chance to ride Goliath in the auction. Fighting with Justin and then making out with Justin and then fighting again. Lying, running, cantering, laughing, spinning, spying, and being shot at in the dark. The world is much more complicated than when Mom dropped me off two months ago, but it’s bigger, too, and the mistakes I make, all four thousand and nineteen of them, are mine.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m really sorry.”

  “We all are,” she says. “But maybe things can get better now.”

  * * *

  I should call Dad. He’ll be pissed if I don’t, now that I’ve called Mom. But talking to Mom, hearing her beaten-up voice, doesn’t make me feel like “things can get better now.” It makes me furious. At him. Mom has her problems. No question. But he left us. For weeks I’ve been feeling calmer and calmer about the whole thing. Now everything has gone back to being a giant suck storm. I shouldn’t call him when I feel like this. It’s a bad idea.

  “Dad?” All I need him to do is tell me there has been a terrible, terrible mistake.

  “Cassidy?” His voice isn’t just far away, it’s at the bottom of the ocean. That is not what I need right now. He clears his throat. Twice. “How are you?”

  “Guess how I am.”

  “I’m so sorry, Cassidy. This isn’t what I wanted.”

  “So why is it happening?

  Pause. Longer pause. “It’s complicated.”

  “Make it simple for me.”

  “Cassidy . . . this isn’t going to help anything.”

  “Did you cheat on Mom? Yes or no.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  When he speaks again his words are drier. You could make croutons with each arid syllable. “That’s not any of your business.”

  I can’t stop myself. Somebody has to say what’s really happening. “Why not? We’re a family. You’re wrecking our family.”

  In the geological age of silence that follows I get some of my sanity back. I feel a little bit sorry.

  “Sometimes people change, Cass. Your mother and I don’t fit anymore. We’re not getting a divorce because I cheated. I cheated because I wasn’t happy.”

  The smallest, tiniest part of me remembers who this is. But it’s too small to slow down the rest of me. “Are you happy now?”

  “I’m heartbroken. But it doesn’t mean I’d be happy with your mother. It means that we need to find another way to be happy. All of us. Your mom and I love you very much.”

  Nope. I’m furious again. “Until I don’t fit?”

  “You’re angry. I get it.”

  “You don’t, Dad. You really don’t.”

  * * *

  After a few minutes Kaya knocks
on the door. “Are you all right, Cassidy?”

  That would be cool. If I was all right. But I my hands are shaking. And my blood is pumping so hard I think I’m going to blow up my eyeballs. I open the door.

  “You want to talk about it?” says Kaya.

  I look at Kaya’s face. Something about the creases around her eyes tells me that she has yelled at people in her family, too. More than once.

  “Not really,” I say. “But thanks.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  I’M DREADING SEEING Justin the next day, and when I do we act like strangers. He eats his eggs by himself, and I surround myself with Ethan, Alice, and Charlie. The space between us should make it easier, but it doesn’t. Just the sight of him turns me inside out. I give Charlie my breakfast and head off to do chores.

  It’s good to sit alone on the tack room floor scrubbing silver on the show halters. It gives me time to cool down, but it also gives me time to realize how little time is left here. We have one week to get ready for the auction. And a few days after that we go home. Even with everything going on here I don’t want to go home. In fact, it shocks me to realize I’m dreading going home more than I was dreading coming here.

  * * *

  After chores Coulter leads us all to the arena, where the mustangs are corralled. He holds out his hands to us as if he has to shut us up, but we’re patiently listening for instructions. “You are all doing wonderful things with your yearlings. Now you must prepare them and yourselves for separation. Your job, like any good trainer, is to teach your student to become independent. Your yearlings should be able to work with all of you, switch back and forth, stand next to other horses, walk over obstacles, and adapt to change.”

  Adapt to change. Yeah. Not my specialty.

  I play some games with my mustang gal pal, Roanie, like dragging the lead line over her legs and running my hand all over her ears. She’s a good sport. But when I take her for a walk, we pass by Justin’s cabin and she jumps all over. Has a total meltdown. Roanie and I are a little too connected.